The array of musical traditions found along el Río Grande del Norte, unique in the
Hispanic world, is due to Nuevo México's geographic situation and historic destiny. From 1598 to 1821, in Spain's
most northerly colonial province, colonists were stranded at the
very rim of Christendom, a geographic frontier determined by deserts, mountains, and the
harsh clime of the northlands. Their music, especially the heroic, novelesque, and burlesque
romances, were necessary inspirations in the daily struggle for survival. As in other isolated
areas of Spain and Latin America, versions of these famous and colorful ballads survived into
modern times. In the lyric vein, the two ancient themes of Eros and Thanatos, love and death,
are constantly renewed in the canciones or lyric compositions of each passing generation. A
more enduring repertory of religious music extols the passions of the spirit.

The remoteness of the province contributed to a chronic shortage of clergy that lasted
well into the 1870s. The resulting vacuum was filled by some of the most extraordinary religious and ceremonial music in the Hispanic world, the florid alabado hymns sung by the
Penitente brotherhood, the entregas or delivery songs, which marked important rites of
passage, and the despedimientos or farewell songs with which the dead are buried. Folk theater
that flourished in the region also inspired its own poignant music, with the widespread pastorelas or shepherds plays, as well as other religious plays, including "El Niño Perdido" ("The Lost Child"), "Los Tres Reyes Magos" ("The Three Kings"), "Las Apariciones de
Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe" ("The Apparitions of Our Lady of Guadalupe"), and others.

Instrumental music found its main expression in bailes or village dances, which have
always been a lively focus of frontier community life. The music of the bailes is a catalog of
the popular dances and tunes accumulated over three centuries. The sensational and somewhat
scandalous valse (waltz), polca (polka), and chotiz (schottische) of the nineteenth century
joined older favorites like the cuadrillas (quadrilles) and redondos (round dances) from more
remote times. Regional dances like the cuna (cradle), indita (little Indian girl), and vaquero
(cowboy) are found only in Nuevo México.

By the turn of the twentieth century, Stanford Professor Aurelio M. Espinosa, the
mentor of Juan B. Rael, lamented the fact that much valuable material had already been lost.
As was to be expected, styles were evolving, and musical forms popular in previous eras were
giving way to new tastes. Gone were the trovos or singing duels that entertained travelers on
the yearly wagon train caravans to Chihuahua. The ancient romance ballads, relics from
another age, were being replaced by newer forms that featured more local and contemporary
events, the décima, indita, and corrido ballads. Only the latter type would survive into the
present. The canción or popular song had begun its rise. Each new generation would decide
what would remain and what was to change.

The close military alliances and cultural ties between the Spanish and the Pueblos of
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries set the stage for a uniquely New Mexican mestizaje or
fusion of cultures. The Matachines dance drama, still performed in Indian Pueblos and
Hispano villages alike, is an allegorical representation of the meeting of cultures and the
coming of a new religion, Catholicism, to Nuevo México, all set to charming violin and guitar
music, European in its melodies and Native American in its use of insistent repetition. The
indita (little Indian girl) is another musical form that contains elements from both cultures. Its
rhythms and melodies show definite Puebloan influences, to the extent that a European ear can
assimilate them. Its themes range from love to tragedy and almost always feature dramatic
interaction between Hispanos and Indians.

Another cultural frontier came with the opening of the Santa Fe Trail in 1821 and the
arrival of the "Americanos," which pushed Nuevo Mexicano culture into an unfamiliar and self-conscious ethnic role. In a modern setting of cultural struggle and assimilation, a simple
canción de amor or love lyric sung in Spanish, becomes an assertion of cultural loyalty and
ethnic identification. In this context, musicians take on the additional role of purveyors of
cultural resistance.

The rough-cut, unpolished, "frontier" qualities of music in Nuevo México were noticed
from the first by early American observers and collectors like Charles F. Lummis, who arrived
on foot in 1884. In the introduction to his songbook, he wrote: "In arid, lonely, gaunt New
Mexico . . . music has taken the imprint of its surroundings." He wondered why the flawless
singing styles and prodigious musicianship so easily found in Mexico and the South seemed to
be absent here. Then as today, the music of the region speaks not of embellished refinement,
but rather of a stark sense of necessity. As times change, so does the definition of what is
necessary for survival, both physical and cultural. With modern communications and
technology, geographic barriers have given way, but cultural barriers loom as large as ever.

In the summer of 1940, Juan B. Rael made a portrait of this musical landscape that
reveals his own interests in folk theater and religious and ceremonial music. He recorded eight
hours of music in six communities: Cerro, Arroyo Hondo, and Taos in New Mexico; and
Manassa, Antonito, and Alamosa in Colorado. Four women and fifteen men were recorded.
The fact that fifteen were age forty and over is an indicator of Rael's interest in the older
residual traditions rather than the new and emerging ones. Three-quarters of the 146 tracks on
36 acetate discs are vocal music and the other quarter is instrumental.

Recording technology makes the Rael collection the first significant documentation
made of the classic repertory of Nuevo Mexicano violin and guitar music used so extensively in
the bailes. A literary folklorist, Rael leaves the analysis of this singular regional style to later
generations of musicologists, who made note of unusual melodic structures and unique
methods of bowing and tuning. Often termed "Spanish Colonial music," this tradition actually
only dates to the 1860s in Mexico, when the latest European dances were brought to the court
of Emperor Maximilian in Mexico City. There are many valses or waltzes in Rael's
collection, twenty-three in number, with evocative and curious names like the "Valse
demócrata" ("Democratic Waltz"), "Valse de cinco pesos"
("Five Dollar Waltz"), "Valse del coyote" ("Coyote Waltz"), and "Valse de Rosana" ( "Rosana Waltz").

Next in number are the marchas, so popular as processional marches during wedding receptions.
The collection includes five versions of "La Varsoviana," known in English as the "put your little foot" song. The title translates as the
girl from Warsaw, an international song and dance craze, inspired by the emergence of the
first Polish republic in the early nineteenth century. This European hit parade also includes
one chotiz or schottische, which is what the international community imagined Scottish dance tunes to resemble. The most notable absences in the Rael collection are the polcas and some of the older forms.

Like his mentor, Aurelio M. Espinosa, Rael was fascinated by the older music and its
link to peninsular Spanish traditions. Both shared a tendency to overlook Indo-Hispano
traditions or more modern Mexican or American influences. Even though there was a local
tradition of indita ballads and an Hispano Matachines dance tradition in the village of Arroyo
Seco, only a few miles east of his home village, Rael included only one example in his
collection. "El Tecolotito" is an intercultural love song about a little owl who
flies back and forth between Indian and Hispano villages. Strangely absent from the collection
are the narrative ballads, perhaps because Espinosa's book Romancero nuevomejicano had
collected them so comprehensively, except for the contemporary ones.

Since the regional repertory of canciones includes so much recent popular music from
Mexico, Rael chose to represent the lyric tradition with only two songs, both of them satirical.
"El medio muerto" ("The Half-Dead One") mocks indecisiveness in the face
of life and death. "Los Bienaventurados" ("The Blessed Ones") is a kind of
parody of the "Sermon on the Mount" sung to the tune of "The Irish Washerwoman." The list
of the blessed includes male and female readers and newspaper subscribers and chastises them
for their credulity and flights of fancy. The allusion to widespread, home-taught Spanish
language literacy contradicts the stereotype of illiteracy among Hispanos.

Besides Rael's love of the music of the folk plays, one of
the interests reflected in his collection is ceremonial music. Two of the instrumental waltzes,
"Valse de los Días" ("Waltz of the Days") and "Valse de los Manueles" ("Waltz of the Immanuels"), are performed not at the bailes but rather on the
festivities of New Year's Eve and New Year's Day respectively. Select groups of revelers go
singing from house to house all night to bring in "Los Días," or all the days of the New Year.
Since January first is the Feast of Immanuel, the visits concentrate on the houses of all the
people named Manuel or Manuela. A number of songs are sung during these visits, but
especially popular are the coplas or
improvised couplets, composed on the spot to honor or poke fun at a particular individual.
During the recording sessions, several singers honored Rael himself with couplets like this
one:

Johnny you have as your name
and Rael for your last name,
a man of learning
and fine sensibility.

Improvised verse is also one of the components of the "Entrega de Novios" ("The Delivery of the Newlyweds"), a
folk
wedding ceremony first researched by Rael. The community would gather to sanction new couples and "deliver" them in song to each
other and their respective families, creating an opportunity for everyone to bless them. Priests
would bless the union whenever they finally came around, or if the couple went to find one --
there was a chronic shortage of priests in outlying areas in the early days. To the
accompaniment of a lively waltz, the singer begins with an invocation to the Virgin, several
verses describing the biblical unions of Adam and Eve and Joseph and Mary, and descriptions
of the wedding ceremony, especially if it took place in a larger town. Then come serious and
humorous verses offering practical advice and admonitions to the new couple. After each
person present files by to bless the couple, the concluding verses are sung to honor specific
individuals such as the in-laws, best man, and maid of honor. The wedding dance at which
the entrega was sung also includes La Marcha, a triumphal march in which lines of couples
divide into single files of men and women who rejoin after dancing in concentric circles and
reform with their hands joined and raised to make the tunnel of love from which the new
couple are the last to emerge. These same wedding traditions are still popular today.

Beyond the plays, bailes, weddings, and songs, Rael's primary interest in the summer
of 1940 was the religious music of the Nuevo Mexicanos. Fully half of the collection is
dedicated to the alabado hymns of the
Hermandad de Nuestro Padre Jesús Nazareno, the Penitente Brotherhood, who for over two
centuries have kept the repertory in their living memories and in hand-copied cuadernos or
ledger notebooks passed down from generation to generation. Several, like "Con
mansedumbre y ternura" ("With Docility and Tenderness") and "Por el rastro
de la sangre" ("Along the Trail of Blood"), are religious romance
ballads dating from seventeenth-century Castille. Musically, some are closely related to even
older Gregorian chant, and their modal melodies are indicators of their antiquity. The poetic
structures of the alabados indicate that some are of erudite origins and were undoubtedly
introduced by Franciscan priests, while the eight-syllable quatrain structure of the majority is
an indication of humble, more recent origins locally and in northern Mexico.

In performance, the alabados are a kind of triple meditation, whose power lies in their
poetry, their music, and the specific services and devotions with which they are used. For instance,
"Soy esclavo de Jesús" ("I Am a Slave of Jesus") is replete with references to
the estandarte or holy standard or banner carried in procession. This alabado is therefore
sung in processions. "Nos dio su cuerpo el Señor" ("The Lord Gave
Us His Body") is set at the scene of the Last Supper and is sung during Communion, on Holy
Thursday, and whenever the Hermanos and their families gather to eat together. "La Pasión" ("The Passion") is sung during Viernes Santo, Good Friday services.
"Considera, alma perdida" ("Consider, Lost Soul") is sung during the
Estaciones de la Cruz, the Stations of the Cross prayer service. In many communities, the
Fourth Station is dramatized with a procession of women carrying the statue of the Virgin and
singing "Madre de Dolores" ("Mother of Sorrows") who meet a procession of
men carrying the statue of Christ, the Man of Sorrows, and singing "Por el rastro de la
sangre" ("Along the Trail of Blood") or another alabado describing
what they are enacting.

The Penitentes and their families are devoted to the Passion of Jesus, and the alabados
bring forth an outpouring of sentiment and remorse, for personal shortcomings and offenses
are seen as the cause of the Crucifixion. Of the sixty-nine alabados Rael recorded, nineteen
narrate different facets of La Pasión and another seventeen center on the suffering of the
Virgin at the sacrifice of her son. Another fourteen are hymns of praise for the Virgin in her
various aspects and vocations as Dolores, Our Lady of Sorrows; Soledad, Our Lady of
Solitude; Guadalupe; Carmel; and Nuestra Señora del Socorro, Our Lady of Succor. Hymns
praising the Virgin and saints like San Pedro and San Antonio are sometimes called alabanzas,
which like alabado translates into hymns of praise. In the alabados, Jesus appears as Jesús
Nazareno, the Nazarene or Man of Sorrows at the moment of his trial, his scourging, and the
way to Calvary; Cristo, the Crucified Christ; El Señor de Mapimí, the Lord of Mapimí, a
regional devotion based in Sonora; and El Santo Niño de Atocha, the Holy Child of Atocha or
Jesus as a pilgrim boy, another regional devotion based in Zacatecas. Seven alabados are
classified as rogativas or entreaties focused on diverse issues like the souls of purgatory, divine
mercy, the last judgment, and confession. Several more evoke specific aspects of the liturgy
like Communion or Extreme Unction, or musicalize prayers like the Ave María or the
Apostles' Creed. Many alabados refer to the devotional practices of the Brothers as they
emulate La Pasión.

Like medieval plainsong, the alabados are sung without measure and proceed only as the
words and themes progress. They are sung antiphonally, with lead singers alternating verses
with group responses, a feature with distinct pedagogical value for missionary priests teaching
the stories of the Church. Alabados are sung a cappella, although the pito, a vertically-held flute, is used to
play, not melodies, but arabesques that evoke the tears of Mary and the cries of the souls in
purgatory. The matraca or cog rattle is also twirled during processions, especially after the
bells are silenced after Holy Thursday of Semana Santa (Holy Week).

Alabados are sung in unison to symbolize the unity and devotional convergence of the
Brotherhood. Older alabados use modal scales and newer ones use tonal scales. The
singing style is highly melismatic, with sometimes four or five notes sung to key syllables in a
quavering voice reminiscent of Arabic and Jewish music. To be fully appreciated, the
alabados must be heard in their performance contexts, the processions of the Hermanos and
the services in moradas, the small chapels scattered in the mountains and canyons of northern
New Mexico and southern Colorado. Juan B. Rael's musical record of them informed his
research and initiated inquiry into their origins and evolution. As he often said, they are the
musical soul of the Nuevo Mexicanos, and the key to a deeper understanding of a distinct
regional culture.